Maxine Beneba Clarke says it is the right of every child to see themselves represented in children’s books.
Photograph: Nicholas Walton-Healey

Australian children who were not white and middle class were all but invisible in children’s books, the author Maxine Beneba Clarke said in her keynote address at the opening of the Melbourne writers festival on Friday night.

She told the audience that children in wheelchairs, or those who wore headscarves, or who were being raised by single or same-sex parents, or who lived in public housing or had brown skin, rarely saw themselves in books. It had a profound impact on their sense of themselves and their place in Australia, and she urged publishers to take more risks when considering children’s books.

“Books render them invisible, that their stories are not important,” she said. “It is the right of every child to see themselves in story.”

In an address that began with a poetry performance piece about race and children, Clarke said she was 19 before she read a novel with a central character who looked like her, and it was a revelation.

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It followed a Sydney childhood in which she and her sister worried at every school Book Week about dressing up as a character from literature. They didn’t know any brown-skinned characters like them, so one year dressed as Hiawatha and Pocahontas.

The theme for the festival is place, identity and belonging, and the 350 events have a strong focus on issues of multiculturalism and immigration, sexuality and gender.

The chairman of the Copyright Agency, the former News Corp Australia chief executive Kim Williams, told the audience that proposals from the Productivity Commission to shake up copyright laws would seriously undermine the local industry and the ability of Australians to hear their own stories.

Williams said the commission’s report revealed “acolytes of flawed economic theory” who had been “hoodwinked” into making grave errors of analysis.

He particularly criticised the proposal to introduce a US-style “fair use” system that would enable the use of Australian writing for free in many cases. Under existing law, copyright protections mean authors are paid if their work is reproduced, with public interest exceptions such as news stories.